So, I suppose we can start to put together the list of things that the Bush Administration is going to try to pull before they leave office, one of the most nefarious being the “right of conscience” rule.via LA Times.

Reporting from Washington — The outgoing Bush administration is planning to announce a broad new “right of conscience” rule permitting medical facilities, doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other healthcare workers to refuse to participate in any procedure they find morally objectionable, including abortion and possibly even artificial insemination and birth control.
For more than 30 years, federal law has dictated that doctors and nurses may refuse to perform abortions. The new rule would go further by making clear that healthcare workers also may refuse to provide information or advice to patients who might want an abortion.

So, essentially, even if you have the right to obtain an abortion, you may not have access to the information necessary to actually know all your options. I would never deny how smart a doctor is, but I don’t really think it is up to a doctor to decide what is morally right for me or for my body. If the law has already decided that I can have access to reproductive technology, then why is a doctor allowed to tell me something different? I would like the advice I get from my doctor to be based on my health needs, not their religious and moral beliefs. I am sorry that is crazy.According to Raw Story this change could hurt rural and poor women the hardest. Melissa Harris-Lacewell in conversation with Maddow over the subject discusses.

Harris-Lacewell explained that regulations like this “right of conscience” rule have “been the new strategy of those who have been opposed to women’s reproductive rights. … Rather than fight this out in the courts … what you do is limit access. You limit the education that doctors are getting in medical school. You limit the ability of these doctors to practice in various states and localities. You just keep reducing, reducing, reducing.”
“That has a disproportionate effect on poor women, on rural women,” Harris-Lacewell stated. “Women who have private health insurance, women who have private physicians, tend to have plenty of access to a variety of reproductive rights options. Poor women and women with less access are the ones hit hardest.”

Lambda Literary Award-winning writer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s Bodymap, published this summer by Mawenzi House, returns often to the word “home.” Home is a meeting of body and map,
tattooed on Piepzna-Samarasinha’s breastplate and charted throughout the work in sensory memories, corporeal trauma, physical pleasures. “You’re going to find the people you can sketch the secret inside the world with. If you can’t find them you can sketch the secret inside of your world inside yourself,” she writes. She sometimes sketches ‘the secret inside of world’ with lovers, and we’re lucky enough to get to listen to the lyric she finds: “Just dissolve into the deliciousness of lying down with someone else who knew what it was like to always lie down.”

The co-founder ...

Lambda Literary Award-winning writer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s Bodymap, published this summer by Mawenzi House, returns often to the word “home.” Home is a meeting of body and map,
tattooed on Piepzna-Samarasinha’s breastplate and charted throughout the work in ...

The Supreme Court acted Monday to keep Texas’ 19 abortion clinics open, amid a legal fight that threatens to close more than half of them.

The justices voted 5-4 to grant an emergency appeal from the clinics after a federal appeals court upheld new clinic regulations and refused to keep them on hold while the clinics appealed to the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court order will remain in effect at least until the court decides whether to hear the clinics’ appeal of the lower court ruling, not before the fall.

The sweaty middle of July in New York City is the perfect time for Summer, Sex & Spirits, hosted by Planned Parenthood of New York City’s all-volunteer Activist Council. This legendary fundraiser for Planned Parenthood of New York City’s services and critical legislative work to move reproductive rights forward has been gracing the city for 11 years now!

Hundreds of New Yorkers gather to drink, dance, and dine (OK, maybe it’s hors d’oeuvres, but dine sounded better). You have a chance to win a free ticket to join us all for this fabulous event, but first we’re going to give you a little quiz to see how much you know about… you guessed it… SEX!

Only one lucky person will win ...

The sweaty middle of July in New York City is the perfect time for Summer, Sex & Spirits, hosted by Planned Parenthood of New York City’s all-volunteer Activist Council. This legendary fundraiser for Planned Parenthood of New ...